Where 25 minutes comes from
Francesco Cirillo started timing his study sessions as a university student in the late 1980s, with a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato, pomodoro in Italian (Cirillo's own site). The interval that stuck was 25 minutes, followed by a short break, with a longer break after every four (Wikipedia's summary of his method).
Nothing about 25 is magic, and Cirillo's site now calls the 25-minute session one expression of a wider habit rather than the point of it. What the number does well is make starting cheap. Twenty-five minutes is short enough that you'll agree to it on a bad day.
Why it's a five-by-five block
Pomo draws one square per minute, so 25 is the length that comes out perfectly square. Halfway through a session you can see it without reading the clock: two and a half rows hollow, the rest still solid.
A four-hour afternoon at 25/5
Pomo's defaults are 25 minutes of focus, 5-minute short breaks and a 15-minute long break after the fourth focus. One full cycle is 130 minutes and holds 100 minutes of focus. Here is what that does to an afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00 pm, if you press Begin as soon as each break ends:
| Phase | From | To | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focus | 1:00 pm | 1:25 pm | 25 min |
| Short break | 1:25 pm | 1:30 pm | 5 min |
| Focus | 1:30 pm | 1:55 pm | 25 min |
| Short break | 1:55 pm | 2:00 pm | 5 min |
| Focus | 2:00 pm | 2:25 pm | 25 min |
| Short break | 2:25 pm | 2:30 pm | 5 min |
| Focus | 2:30 pm | 2:55 pm | 25 min |
| Long break | 2:55 pm | 3:10 pm | 15 min |
| Focus | 3:10 pm | 3:35 pm | 25 min |
| Short break | 3:35 pm | 3:40 pm | 5 min |
| Focus | 3:40 pm | 4:05 pm | 25 min |
| Short break | 4:05 pm | 4:10 pm | 5 min |
| Focus | 4:10 pm | 4:35 pm | 25 min |
The eighth focus doesn't fit before 5:00, so the afternoon ends after seven. That spare 25 minutes is real: fold it into the long break, or stop early.
When 25 is too short
If you're regularly mid-sentence when the bell goes, try a longer block before you abandon the method. The 50/10 timer doubles the focus and keeps the break proportionate. In the app, the presets under the face jump straight to 15, 25 or 50, and you can drag the face up or down to set anything from 1 minute to 3 hours for the next session.
By the Pomo team